1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a video game system and a storage medium storing a video game program and, more particularly, to a video game system including a plurality of video game devices capable of communicating with one another via a communications network and a storage medium storing a video game program to be executed by such video game devices.
2. Description of the Background Art
In the prior art, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 7-213744 (hereinafter “Patent Document 1”), for example, discloses a video game played between a plurality of video game devices capable of communicating with one another via a communications network. In the video game system disclosed in Patent Document 1, a plurality of independent video game devices are connected together via a data transmission line such that data can be exchanged therebetween. The player of each video game device can play a multi-player video game with the players of the other video game devices in a common game space by looking at the game screen on the display. As the synchronization control operation is performed for the synchronization between the video game devices, a synchronized game screen is displayed on the display of each video game device. Therefore, the game screen can be naturally displayed to the players of the video game devices.
However, where data are exchanged between a plurality of video game devices via a communications network, the amount of time required for the data transmission/reception varies from one device to another depending on the communications environment. For example, the data communication speed of a system where independent video game devices are adjacently placed together and connected together via a wired data transmission line, as shown in the preferred embodiment section of Patent Document 1, is clearly higher than that of a system of a type that is rapidly becoming popular where the video game devices are connected together via a network such as the Internet. In other words, it takes more time for data to be transmitted/received between video game devices that are connected together via the Internet than between video game devices that are connected together as shown in the preferred embodiment section of Patent Document 1. Thus, for the same amount of data, it takes longer to transmit/receive the data if the data is transmitted/received via a network, thereby making it difficult to synchronize the video game devices. Moreover, as more data need to be transmitted/received for the purpose of synchronization, it makes even more difficult to control the system.